Heart Sutra (essay)

Because form is the same as emptiness and emptiness is the same as form, there can be no subjectivity, no consciousness or intelligence and no true aprehension of reality into a mental content. Therefore, there can be no enlightenment. There's nothing to be attained! The Herman Hesse-mediated Western orientalistic idea that the law of cause and effect links suffering with desire and desire with attachment and letting go of attachment lets you transcend? There is nothing to be transcended.

Which is precisely why (and here is the aporia) the wise monks sing "gate gate paragate...". Because that is practice, not transcendence.

Our culture's whole idea of "enlightenment" (as in Aufklärung) is about theoretical development and conceptuali insight leading into a secular kind of transcendence. And sure, to some heroic-narrative extent this is how we've arrived at our civilization's greatest achievements. But we haven't done it by sheer force of intellect alone -- rather, the belief in the sheer force of intellect might have done much to keep us back.

The conception of progress through practice described in the Heart Sutra, in contrast, correlates to Heidegger's counterenlightenment idea of Sorge (which inevitably connects back to Dasein, which I claim to be remarkably resonant with buddhist non-self). Heidegger wants to downplay intellect and explicit knowledge which can be wrote down and defended in a concept-level contest of ideas. Instead, focus is given to knowledge that is tacit, arises from messing about with the real world and that can't be really taught short of an extensive hands-on apprenticeship. The classical example is woodworking and carpentry, but I claim this applies in high-concept professions such as mathematics. Sure, in engineering school they're able to teach you a few rote procedures (take derivatives and equal to zero) that give you some basic result, but in higher maths there is no royal road to proving theorems or solving problems: you just spend years and years doing pencil-and-paper exercises and learn the metaphorical grain of the wood in your heart, in your fingers.

This isn't Aufklärung at all, it's a community of practices. Why? Because abstractions are leaky and concepts attach only to other concepts, it's futile for you to read the definition of a Hilbert space on Wikipedia -- nothing is a Hilbert space. Because acquiring concepts is futile, the sheer force of intellect is powerless. And (in a parallel aporia with the Heart Sutra) this is why everyone (and not just intellectuals -- this is the point of public schooling) is encouraged to develop their intellect and learn stuff they'll never use.

Because the knowledge you can read in a book is precisely that, useless. Apprenticeship and carpentry is all there is.